James, to say you've bitten off a mouthful would be an understatement <g>!  To answer your question...
 
Highly structured material (trees, tables, etc) (such as that on page 13 and elsewhere) can exceed 70 characters.  For reproducing trees in HTML, the simplest method (and the one I've used), is to take the text version of the tree, copy/paste it into your HTML file, and wrap it in <pre></pre> tags.
 
For trees with preceding diagrams (page 13 again) insert something like "[Illustration: Purusha]" in your text file, and the actual diagram in your HTML file.
 
For extremely wide trees/tables, if any (more than 100 characters, say), split the tree into left and right halves for the text file.  At the end of the file, include a transcriber's note mentioning which tables have been treated this way.  For HTML, you can rejoin the halves, or leave them as in the text file, again using the <pre></pre> trick.
 
I notice that some tables (pages 58, 59) are split across pages. Unless you can figure out how the two portions are joined, it's probably best to treat them as two separate tables.  If you can figure how they're joined, it's acceptable to join them, but it looks as though you might end up with an extremely wide table.  I'd say to keep things simple, and don't attempt a join.
 
From what I've seen of the book, you should be able to render all trees/tables with alpha-numerics.
 
Good luck!
 
Al
 
 
-----Original Message-----
From: gutvol-d-bounces@lists.pglaf.org [mailto:gutvol-d-bounces@lists.pglaf.org] On Behalf Of James Simmons
Sent: Thursday, December 08, 2011 11:56 AM
To: Gutenberg Volunteers
Subject: [gutvol-d] Recommendations on handling family tree tables

I am working on transcribing this book:

http://www.archive.org/details/studyofbhagavata00benaiala

This is a translation into English of an important Hindu scripture, originally in Sanskrit.  Now that I have committed myself to transcribing it I find that it has many, many family tree tables in it.  These are not part of the scripture itself, but were added to clear up who begat who.  (All mythical characters).  Some of these stretch out so wide that the page is rotated in the original.  Others could easily be duplicated with ASCII characters in 80 columns or less.

I've looked at some PG titles with geneologies like this one about Bach:

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/35041/35041-h/35041-h.html#toc49

In this one the family tree tables are treated as illustrations.  That would certainly be a simple way to deal with them, but again about half of the diagrams could be done with ASCII text.  It would be painful, but it could be done.  So do I do half and half, or try and do all text, or just do illustrations all the way?

Thoughts?

James Simmons